the eelful hovercraft

I’m not completely sure whether it’s my personal problem, or – as I want to believe – indeed a nationwide one, but my childhood was totally deprived of rubber duckies. It’s not that I haven’t had any bath toys (I must’ve had some, I even vaguely remember a couple of them), it’s that not one of them was a duck, not to mention a yellow one. A red beak was completely out of the question.

I think the reason behind all this was that in communist Poland, with its planned economy and no competition on the market whatsoever, everybody got to play with the same, rather limited set of toys; one Christmas we all wanted plastic snakes that moved when held by their tails (and everybody eventually got one, and we could even choose whether the snake was dull-brown or dull-green), the next year we all wanted a primitive copy of the Monopoly board game, and all these years we weren’t even aware that something is missing, that something is very, very wrong.

We weren’t entirely cut off from the toys the rest of the Civilised World played with, of course; some of us had them from abroad, brought mainly by relatives, either from Far West (Matchboxes, LEGO, Barbies and so on) or from the Soviet Union (Russian versions of Matchboxes, LEGO, Barbies and so on). Those of us who didn’t have any contacts could always buy “dollar coupons”, which were colorful, small pieces of paper about the size of banknotes and were supposed to be exchangeable for American dollars on a one-to-one basis (in reality, of course, the whole deal worked only one way, i.e. everybody was happy to give you coupons for dollars, but nobody was crazy enough to do the opposite). What were the coupons good for, you ask; well, the whole idea was that we could buy with them a variety of western products – like jeans, Donald Duck bubble gum or, surprise surprise, even toys – in a network of special shops, called Pewexes (Pewex itself was an acronym for Przedsiębiorstwo Eksportu Wewnętrznego, which, in turn, meant The Enterprise for Domestic Export; I’m not making this up, Poland was called “the merriest barrack in the Soviet Camp” for a reason). So it’s not that we weren’t able to get real rubber duckies if we wanted to, but I doubt anyone spent their precious coupons or molested dear aunt from the UK to get such a (seemingly) silly toy.

Thus, the whole archetype of a yellow rubber duck as a life-long companion from the beggining of remembered time seems to be missing from our common culture; we can’t fully relate to the bath-obsessed Golgafrinchan captain of the B Ark (this is the moment when those of you who haven’t yet read any of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Trilogy books go “Jesus, I knew I was forgetting something!” and scurry off to the nearest bookshop) and his rubber duck, we don’t get that warm and cozy feeling when Windows XP sets our login icon to a small bird with a flat beak, finally – we can’t fully grasp the importance of events like the escape of the thousands of their kin from the container captivity and their later trip across the seas of the world. Which is a shame.

So, dear Santa, a request for the next year’s round, if I may: a yellow, red-beaked rubber ducky. Better late than never.